About “Alpha”, and Progress on “Out of Egypt”

The last few weeks, I have to admit I’ve run into a bit of a problem. Something about Alpha just isn’t working; it’s like the more I look at it, the more I realise it was never intended to stand alone and would only work as part of a longer piece. Maybe I’m simply making a mistake in splitting it in two: the first half of the story is depressing as all get-out and the second half isn’t. It’s like splitting up a symphony and only leaving the crashy bits. I can’t help but know it isn’t complete, and doesn’t work without its denouement.

When I first told of Dark’s history, what little of it he’d let me see, anyway, it came at a moment when everything else in the novel was bright and promising. There was a balance between his awful past and his immediate present, and finally having something he badly wanted. It made the terrible parts less terrible, somehow. I hate to put the release off any longer, but I need to do that again, and writing Part 2 (perhaps even as a frame for the story rather than actually as a Part 2) is the only way.

Out of Egypt, on the other hand, is going great guns. Although my health this last month has put a spanner in the works, I know every step of the story from start to finish. It has, I hope, a good mix of everything that you would expect to find after reading Dark. Alice and Dark must come to rely on each other solely without the support of their friends; more secrets come to light that will really change everything; there are some action sequences that I hope are a bit different and a few wickedly scary bits. What I have down so far is working as I hoped, and with a bit of editing will be something I can be happy with. But then, I’ve had a whole two years to plan it, lol.

Feel free to rap me on the knuckles for getting it so wrong with Alpha. Just don’t, for pity’s sake, reach for Dark’s katana to do it.